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Court Packing

Steve Vladeck's "Hard Questions About Court Expansion"

A leading critic of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court oultines reasons why court-packing is a bad response to its flaws.

Ilya Somin | 10.16.2026 7:23 PM

Cartoon criticizing Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 court-packing plan. (NA)

Georgetown law Professor Steve Vladeck is one of the leading critics of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But in an insightful recent post on his substack, he outlines key reasons why "court expansion" is a bad response to its flaws. The cure is likely to be worse than the disease:

[I]t seems to me that those who are fully onboard the expansion-or-bust train should have to do more than simply assert that having four new Democratic appointees on the Court in 2029 would be a self-evidently "good" thing. If nothing else, proponents of expansion should have to answer the following four questions:

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